We've all been there. We're hanging out with friends, trying to casually impress one another with our obscure and utterly useless knowledge of pop culture trivia, when our brain freezes up.

"Oh, yeah. I know what you're talking about. It was that Cagney movie, he plays some guy named Cody something, and he and his ma are driving ... uhm ... they're driving ... heh heh. Well, it's either a Ford or a Chevy. Or maybe a Studebaker. Or a Tucker."

Fortunately for the passive-aggressive, know-it-all movie geek in all of us, some even geekier movie geeks have created the Internet Movie Cars Database -- a brilliant, handy, vast, and utterly addictive compendium of cinematic automotive arcana.

Want to see photos of the cream-white Dodge Challenger Barry Newman drove in that melodramatic, existential '70s road movie, Vanishing Point?  They got it. (And we have it here, atop this entry.)

James Bond's Aston Martin? Of course.

McQueen's iconic Highland Green 1968 Mustang GT 390 from Bullitt? Duh.

Tell your boss that you're working on a really important project and can't be disturbed, then hunker down for a few hours with your favorite actors, actresses, cars, and motorcycles. The IMCD is big and pointless and self-deprecating and enormously fun -- the way the Web was always meant to be.

(By the way: Cagney's car in White Heat? A 1941 Buick Special. "Made it , ma! Top of the world!")

--BEN COSGROVE

A 1941 Buick Special from the 1949 Warner Bros. classic, White Heat, often driven by Cody Jarrett's equally sociopathic mama, played to creepy, Oedipal perfection by Margaret Wycherly.